Make it easy

Trigger warning: There is a layer of melancholy to this post, but I do mean it to be encouraging.

Last week I and my Lovely First Wife were in Savannah on a quick jaunt. While there we dropped in on two museums, the SCAD Museum and the Jepson Center, and both had some inspirational exhibits.

At the Jepson, there was “The Costumes of Glenn Close,” and it’s exactly what it says in the title. Close has a rider in her contracts that she gets to keep her costumes. This exhibit ranged from Sarah, Plain and Tall to 102 Dalmations and beyond — and both the design and construction of these costumes were amazing.

The costumes to the right are from 102 Dalmations, designed by Anthony Powell. They show Cruella’s transition away from her “reformed” self back into her over-the-top villainous self. It’s the red one that provoked a thought.

Here are a couple of photos closer up.

The amount of detail — and therefore the amount of labor — in this one costume was mind-blowing. In all my years as artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company, I’m pretty sure I never had a costumer who could have made that.

And — I realized — because of that I never dreamed of designing something like this.

That’s not even the melancholy part: I’m pretty sure I couldn’t design something like this even if I had a costumer who could make it. That’s the melancholy part.

Here’s why that doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter because we still did amazing things at NCTC. We set Shakespeare in the Romantic era, Restoration, at a beach resort, even in Elizabethan, with costumes to match. We built giant abstract sets and sets that were Rube Goldberg in their design. We performed everything from Neil Simon to Shakespeare to musicals to world premieres.

And what we could design, we did design and build. We — our scenius — Made the Thing That Is Not, even if we didn’t have the resources to be as glamorous as Mr. Powell’s stunning design.

Above all, I know that if I had walked into the theatre with a design for something like this, my scenius would have done its best to make it happen. That’s the important thing.